After the Saucers Landed

by Douglas Lain

  “There is a network of associations that we use to interpret objects in the world, a network of ideas that allows us to recognize that the yellow shape in front of us is a single thing, a taxi cab, even as its shape appears to change as it rolls past. Looking at the taxi from the front reveals an entirely different set of shapes and impressions than looking at the same vehicle from the side, diagonally, or from the back, but because of the way we have learned to associate certain signals we make it out as a New York taxi and not as the strange warping thing, the confusion of color and sound, that perception alone would reveal,” she says. She’s monologuing here and I wonder how long it’s been that she’s been talking. I wonder how long it’s been that we’ve been walking and whether it would be possible to retrace our steps. There was a toaster oven on a flashcard, there was Asket’s warning, her admonishment that I should cooperate, and now there is the Lucky Goldstar logo and her prattle.

  “The reason you think I’m your wife has to do with the idea of your wife, the network of associations that really is your wife. It’s not about what I look like,” she says. “Think of this, everything and everyone on the streets of New York move to the same time signature, right? I mean roughly everyone does, and that’s something you have to pick up on when you’re in New York City. You can tell the tourists from how they move, from how they miss the beat, but when these tourists figure it out, when they move with the crowd, they’re New Yorkers.”

  We’re walking like New Yorkers ourselves, keeping to the beat, but we could walk slower or faster and become Mexicans or Swedes.

  Asket is looking at her feet as she walks and I’m watching her legs and feet too. She’s not in her sequined jumpsuit anymore. What I’m watching is how her orange and white striped skirt moves, how her hips sway a bit with each step. This isn’t really how Virginia walked or walks. We’re on 46th Street, on restaurant row, moving under foliage, under leaves from the small trees planted along the curb, and underneath awnings and signs that read Broadway Joe’s, Galaxy, and Barbetta’s.

  “You’re different,” I say to her. “How are you different?”

  “I’m a network of associations that knows about networks, about switching and moving and time signatures,” she says. “I’m a Pleidien.”

  She moves a lock of her sandy blond hair behind her ear and licks her lips and I wonder if she’s always had sandy blond hair or if, at one point, she was a brunette. She’s waiting for me to ask another question, to ask about what will happen to me now that I know, or almost know, what she knows, but I change the subject.

  “Let’s get a drink,” I say. I gesture to Barbetta’s restaurant and then ask it again. “You want a drink? You hungry? Let’s get lunch.”

  Inside Barbetta’s we find candles, pink walls, and ornate eighteenth-century furniture. The chandelier above our table is a glory of ironwork and glass and to our left there is a harpsichord. The rest of the diners are dressed in blue and black business suits or red or peach-colored silk dresses but we press on and order duck and white wine and I’m pleased to discover that Asket is uncomfortable in her wool skirt, it’s too informal for this network apparently. I put my hand in the pocket of my grey vest, in the top left pocket, and tap my chest.

  Asket’s hand shakes a bit as she takes a sip of her wine. She puts her hand to her head and looks down at the pristine white tablecloth. You’d expect, given the decor, that the tables would be a bit dusty, but they aren’t.

  “Explain something to me,” I say. “It’s something that’s been bothering all of us. That is, it’s been bothering Harold, Rain, and me. That first time you switched you were an artist’s model. That is, you were this model and then you were Patricia, but Patricia had been Carole before. Why is it that you, the person who had been this model decided that, when you realized you’d been switched. . .that is, why didn’t you try to get that model identity back? Why did you decide that Carole was the real you? I don’t understand.”

  “I told you already. I explained that.”

  “Take me through it again,” I say.

  “I remembered that switch first. I remember being Carole and then becoming Patricia instead,” she says.

  “But that wasn’t your memory. I mean, when you realized that you’d been that artist’s model, when you recalled that that switch was the most recent one, why did you care about the earlier memory? Shouldn’t the most recent switch be the one that matters? And even if it isn’t, even if you have to go back to the first switch ever, wouldn’t you have to talk to the woman who had been Patricia and had become the artist’s model in order to find the original?”

  “I can’t explain it rationally,” she says. “It isn’t like that. It wasn’t about what was original or intellectually true.”

  “What then? What was the basis? How did you decide?”

  “It was about feelings. It was about how remembering being Harold’s wife made me feel.”

  She’d reached out to Flint back in January, sending him a few postcards and letters and then, in early February finding him through a computer bulletin board system called the Well. She’d read about the service, found out about the group of high-tech free spirits in Sausalito who had set up some computers and modems in the basement of the office building that housed the Whole Earth Review when she picked up a copy of Mondo 2000 magazine from the SFSU bookstore in December of 1991. The woman on the cover was standing in a cathedral, dressed in a brown robe that might’ve been burlap or might’ve been silk, a woman who looked like either a fashion model or a monk. And she’d purchased the magazine because the cover advertised an article on Identity Construction along with one on DMT Elves and Project Blue Beam.

  The essay on Identity Construction wasn’t much. Changing careers wasn’t what Asket wanted to read about, but a short essay about the Well had caught her attention. This computer bulletin board connected people in the Bay Area to the internet and, conversely, connected people outside the Bay Area to these users of the Well through the internet. The organizers and managers for the Well thought of themselves as cyber-environmentalists and life hackers, but what interested Asket was the fact that Harold Flint was apparently a member.

  “He’d ignored my postcards and letters,” she tells me. And then, after taking another sip of wine, she waits for me to prompt her.

  “You found him through this computer network?” I ask.

  “We started talking in the mind/body conference, during a flame war about the split, but soon enough it was all private,” she says. “He sent email.”

  On the Well’s forum Asket got Harold’s attention right away. She interrupted a conversation between Harold and some psychedelic guru in Berkeley by mentioning the name of a hotel. She told Harold that she knew him, that they’d known each other, and she’d mentioned the hotel where they had, the two of them, solved the mind/body problem in real time.

  “I’m the Oregon City contactee,” she told him. And that was true in a way. That is, she no longer thought of herself that way, but she was in fact stuck in that position, in that personality. Then she told Harold the name of her favorite drink and her old room number.

  The fact that Harold had slept with Patricia, that he’d slept with one of his UFO clients, doesn’t surprise me. It didn’t surprise me then, when it happened. At least, it didn’t surprise me much. At Black Mountain his collaborations had led to a number of short-lived romances with both men and women, including Walker. Flint isn’t a particularly warm person, but he isn’t asexual.

  “I’ve had my own dealings in that direction,” I said. When I first met Harold, when we first started co-writing, or to put it more accurately and bluntly, when I’d first been hired to ghostwrite his books, there were a few incidents that led me to wonder if he was interested. He was with Carole then too.

  “You think he’s tried to seduce you?” Asket asks. “Sometime in the past, somewhere in your memory, you think he made a pass at you?” She finds the idea funny.

  “We originally com
municated through the mail. Just like the two of you, actually. He sent along some collages and some of those collages had had a sexual component. A few were overtly erotic. Homoerotic even.”

  She puts her chin in her hand and her fingers over her mouth to hide a smile. “What did he send you? Describe one of the images.”

  One had been from a gay porn magazine. “Two body builders making love. A black body builder and a white body builder. The black muscle man taking the white one from behind only Harold had replaced their heads with cut outs from National Geographic. The black man had the head of goat, a ram, and the white body builder’s head had been replaced by the head of a raccoon.”

  Asket puts her head down so that her right hand is pressed against her forehead. She looks down at the tablecloth. She’s laughing, quietly laughing. “I think you’re misremembering,” she says. “It’s very interesting to hear about though.”

  “It is?”

  “He didn’t send me collages.”

  “No?”

  “He was, after some time, direct with me,” she says. “He made it clear.”

  I don’t know what to say to this so I return to my meal, or what’s left of it. I pick through my green beans, now cold, with my salad fork.

  “You’re jealous,” she says.

  For Asket the mind/body forum was a playground, a virtual space for an erotic game. She asked Harold why, if he knew the answer to the mind/body problem, he wouldn’t just come right out and tell her what it was. Why was he always just insinuating at it, hinting, but never really explaining?

  In private email she wrote: “You tell me that you want to relive our nights together. Which part of you wants to do that? Your body or your mind?”

  “I don’t remember telling you I want to relive anything” he wrote back. “What are you? Psychic?”

  When they communicated publicly at the Well he was curt and academic with her. He answered her questions about sensations and identity, about her sense of disconnection from her body, her worries about her identity, with quotes from Hegel and Plato and French philosophers like Althusser. He was a namedropper, but then he’d send her a dirty poem or provoke her with a question.

  “Ideologies are fantasies that support our relationships with each other and these false pictures give us our very identities. In fact, we don’t really fantasize about the world, but rather we are the fantasy,” he wrote to her in the philosophy forum.

  “Where do these fantasies come from? Where is the origin?”

  He responded to this question privately, by email. “Our fantasies, like this one we’re concocting about each other, don’t have an origin. We’re making it now by acting it out, or typing it out.”

  We order another bottle of wine and then wait for the waiter in silence. Looking down at the tablecloth I find a spot where I’ve spilled some wine. I feel a bit of panic about this and then let out my breath slowly. I think I’m the one who is drunk.

  “For me the problem wasn’t just academic, it wasn’t just a game,” Asket says.

  “The problem? What problem?”

  “The mind/body problem.”

  12

  third space

  Our fourth book, the one we stopped writing when the saucers landed, was entitled The Third Space. The idea was to take Jacque Vallée’s idea that the UFO phenomenon was a kind of mythic control system and run with it. We would explain the UFO phenomenon not from the perspective of astrophysics or conspiracy theories, we’d put the extraterrestrial hypothesis aside. Instead of from outer space the aliens were from this Third Space, a space that was neither internal to people nor out there in the world. The Third Space was something humans had been creating since we’d come down from the trees. To say it was from the imagination was to miss it, but in modern society it had become primarily associated with the arts. The Third Space was where ideas were independent and freely associated. It was a realm where things were implied but could never be directly known. The Third Space was where our lives were acted out and yet, it was a place without people. None of us could yet sustain a life there.

  “It’s like television,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “The Third Space is like a television screen.”

  Asket nods. This was the kind of thing that she’d gone to Harold for, what she wanted Harold to explain to her. If she wasn’t her body and she wasn’t just her ideas, just the thoughts in her head, then what was she? She could change her body, swap it around for someone else’s, but she always lost a bit of herself in the process. Part of her always came out different. Was there anything that was fixed, permanent, or real? And if not, then how was there anything at all? How could everything be a mere appearance without there also being something real? What would a mere appearance be an appearance of if there was nothing behind or beyond it?

  “This Third Space,” she says. “It’s real?”

  “I have no idea,” I say.

  Jacques Vallée wrote that the control system was “the means through which man’s concepts are being rearranged” and that because this system works on the level of myth or imagination the visions and experiences the control system delivers are always absurd. What we added, what Harold believed before the landing, was that the control system had a goal, an end. The goal was to make itself visible. The control system was something we had built, something we were always building and rebuilding, and when we recognized that we were building this system, and that it was a system of control, we’d be free.

  “That’s what I promised him,” Asket says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d tried a hundred different ways to tell him what was happening, to tell him what I’d experienced, who I thought I was…”

  “You thought you were his wife,” I say. “But you never told him that.”

  “Not directly,” she says.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I could help him be free.”

  Harold was excited by Patricia when he saw her at the convention center and she hated to disappoint him with the news that she was actually his wife. After all, the misunderstanding wasn’t exactly accidental. She had traveled across the country to meet him at the MUFON symposium, and while her main goal was to tell him what had happened to her in 1986, what had, finally, happened again, she had other ambitions too, and she wasn’t exactly surprised that all Harold wanted was to make sure that she had his room key.

  They compared their schedules, got everything arranged, and then, assured, he left her to explore the steel struts and glass walls of the Jacob Javits Convention Center while he prepared to give a speech.

  The lecture was to be about Flint’s idea of the self-confirming falsehood, and, while the program notes didn’t make this plain, the photograph that accompanied the description of his topic insinuated that the Pleidiens were themselves examples of this idea.

  Patricia arrived around eleven a.m. when the late morning sun was nearly directly overhead. Standing in warm natural light amidst the Pleidiens and UFO enthusiasts, looking up at the latticework of steel and the stair-step pattern of glass cubes overhead, Asket enjoyed the open exposure. The bustling of the crowd under the high ceiling, the open air, the sunlight, and the television monitors mounted here and there, made her feel safe. The moment was both ordinary and ordered. The organizers, the architects, the staff members and government officials manning the booths, they knew what they were doing. Everything was under control.

  It was only when she found a folding chair by the main stage, only when Harold began to speak, that her stomach flipped and her anxiety returned.

  “A self-confirming falsehood,” Harold said, “can only be discovered in a dream or in a hallucination.”

  Here’s how it went: What was required for a statement to be discovered as both self-confirming and false was for one to become lucid. He gave the example of dreaming that one was in Paris, perhaps on the metro, and of hearing a Parisian man or woman say the following: “This
sentence is in French.” Harold made a special point of repeating this.

  “‘This sentence is in French,’” he said. “‘This sentence is in French.’ Only, of course, it isn’t in French. The sentence ‘This sentence is in French,’ is in English. However, if you’re dreaming that you’re in Paris and you hear a woman dressed in the latest French fashion, whatever that might be, let’s say she’s wearing a beret and a nautical sweater with black and white stripes, when such a dream woman says the sentence ‘This sentence is in French’ you are likely, if you’re dreaming or feverish or even if your just newly arrived in Paris and surrounded by a cacophony of the French language in a public space, you’re likely to think to yourself, that sentence is self-evidently true. And, in fact, if you understand the sentence as something spoken in French then it is self-evidently true. Just as ‘This sentence is in English’ is self-evidently true right now.”

  To Asket, Harold seemed unreal. Up on stage he reminded her of nothing so much as a character in a horror movie. He was the character who realized that the monster aliens were on the move, that they were taking over. He was talking slowly, deliberately, about optical illusions, but what she heard was, “You’re in danger! Something terrible has happened! You aren’t who you think you are! Can’t you see? They’re after you! They’re here already. You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”

  And then, in the middle of this, it happened.